The success of the Atlantic Cable, however, brought Maury another decoration. This was offered by Maximilian in the following letter: “My dear Counselor Maury,—It was with pride that I heard of the scientific triumph just achieved, and due to your illustrious labors. The Transatlantic Cable, while uniting both hemispheres, will continually recall to their minds the debt of gratitude they owe to your genius. I congratulate you with all my heart, and I am pleased at announcing to you that I have appointed you Grand Cross of the Order of Guadalupe. Receive the assurance of the good wishes of your affectionate, Maximilian”. Maury, not realizing perhaps that Maximilian recognized justly his right to share in the honor of the final success of the laying of the Atlantic Telegraph, replied modestly, “The letters of the 16th and 18th of August with which I am honored show how kind and good your Majesty always is. They do me much—too much honor, for I had no hand in the achievement to which your Majesty so graciously refers. The Telegraphic Cable in which I am to take part is not yet ready; when it is, I hope to deserve the Imperial ‘well done’ which is ever ready to encourage all good works. For the present, therefore, I do not ask for the decoration of Grand Cross of the Order of Guadalupe”.
In the same letter, Maury shows that he was not unmindful of the trend of events in Mexico, for he continued, “Events have vindicated the wisdom of my not returning to Mexico. Jealousies within and enmity without had already paralyzed my efforts to serve your Majesty and Empire. I still see in the efforts of the Emperor and Empress of Mexico to give good government with its blessings to that distracted country one of the most sublime moral spectacles that is to be found in the annals of dynasties. As soon as I discovered that I could not assist in the noble work I resolved to stay away, for I have not the heart either to hinder or embarrass your Majesty in these great labors. Animated by the sentiments which I professed when first we met, I have the honor to subscribe myself an humble but true friend of your Majesty’s. M. F. Maury”.
By the end of June, 1866, matters had come to such a pass in Mexico, through the exhaustion of the resources of the government, the announced determination of Napoleon III to withdraw all French troops from the country, and the opposition to Maximilian’s regime by both republicans and clericals in Mexico as well as by the government of the United States, that the throne appeared so much in danger that the Empress determined, much against Maximilian’s wishes, to go to France to make personal appeal for assistance from the Emperor Napoleon, who had promised Maximilian to support him in Mexico for five years. After failing to secure help from the French Emperor who had concluded that it was not politic for him longer to support his protegees in Mexico, she left the palace of Saint Cloud, after exclaiming, “What after all should I, a daughter of a Bourbon, have expected from the word of a Bonaparte!” Going thence to Pope Pius IX in Rome, she was equally unsuccessful in obtaining papal intervention. So terrible was the effect of this failure upon the overwrought Empress that she immediately afterwards, October 1, lost her reason and became hopelessly insane.[23]
Maximilian was informed of his wife’s condition, and made up his mind to abdicate the throne. In this he was advised by General Bazaine, through instructions from his master, Napoleon himself, who wished Maximilian to leave with the French troops. But in an evil hour he listened to the advice of the clericals and made up his mind to remain in Mexico. Events then moved rapidly to a tragic climax. The French troops began leaving in February, 1867, the last embarking March 12; the republican government under Juarez extended its power rapidly, and on May 15 at Queretaro Maximilian with his Mexican generals Miramon and Mejia were betrayed by Colonel Lopez to the Juarists and, after a trial by court-martial, were shot on June 19. Of this event Maury wrote, “Poor Max! He died for his honor. He and ‘my’ Carlotta are the martyrs of the age”.
As affecting his own affairs, he afterwards wrote of this Mexican tragedy, “But for my good luck in having J. D. and Mal. for enemies to send me here into banishment, and then kind Mexican villains to intrigue me out of Mexico, you see the rocks that but for enemies I should have split upon”. A very few years afterwards the mills of the gods ground out their punishment for the faithless Emperor Napoleon, and his empire went down like a house of cards before the onrush of the German armies in 1870. Of Maury’s connection with Maximilian and Napoleon, his cousin Rutson Maury wrote, “It was a special Providence that carried you away from Mexico and that prevented your linking your fortunes with those of Louis Napoleon”.
Maury’s decision to remain in England turned out better, in every way, than he had anticipated. Here in London in the midst of most pleasant and congenial surroundings he lived with his wife, three youngest daughters, and son Matthew, Jr., who was then attending the London School of Mines. During this peaceful life, in 1866, Maury became a regular member of the Church, being confirmed with his son and his daughter Lucy in Dr. Tremlett’s church at Belsize Park, London, by Dr. Charles Todd Quintard, Bishop of Tennessee, who was then in England to attend the Pan-Anglican Assembly at Lambeth and also to raise money for the University of the South at Sewanee.
In 1868, Maury was signally honored by Cambridge University which bestowed upon him the degree of LL.D. He was accompanied to Cambridge for the ceremonies by his wife, his daughters Mary and Lucy, and his friend, the Reverend Dr. Tremlett. Maury thus humorously referred to the occasion: “So you don’t know what I mean by the ‘coronation’, eh? Why boy, I’m a Cambridge LL.D. and am going there, I and Max and the Queen on the 28th—she to unveil the Prince Consort and I to be rigged up in ‘died garments from Bozra’ in a gown and a cap and a beautiful red silk cowl and hear myself all done up in Latin!”
The “Max” whom Maury mentioned in this letter was Max Müller, the famous Sanskrit scholar. Still another distinguished savant received the LL.D. on the same day; this was William Wright, translator of Egyptian manuscripts and hieroglyphics at the British Museum.[24] He wrote afterwards to Maury of the bestowal of the degrees as follows: “I have not been at Cambridge lately, but I know that all our friends there are well. Max Müller is now in Germany; I hope to see him at Kiel at the end of September, when we shall both attend the gathering of the German Orientalists. Lord, what a figure we three of us looked, dressed up like lobsters, in the midst of that big hall, gazed at by such a host of people, ‘when shall we three meet again?’ Certainly never under the like circumstances. I was glad to see that Oxford conferred its degree the other day on your poet Longfellow”.
During the ceremonies, the Dean made a long oration in Latin, which was addressed to the newly-made “learned Doctors”. The portion of this which introduced Maury is as follows: “I present to you Matthew Fontaine Maury, who while serving in the American Navy did not permit the clear edge of his mind to be dulled, or his ardor for study to be dissipated, by the variety of his professional labors, or by his continual change of place, but who, by the attentive observations of the course of the winds, the climate, the currents of the seas and oceans, acquired these materials for knowledge, which afterwards in leisure, while he presided over the Observatory at Washington, he systematized in charts and in a book—charts which are now in the hands of all seamen, and a book which has carried the fame of its author into the most distant countries of the earth. Nor is he merely a high authority in nautical science. He is also a pattern of noble manners and good morals, because in the guidance of his own life he has always shown himself a brave and good man. When that cruel Civil War in America was imminent, this man did not hesitate to leave home and friends, a place of high honor and an office singularly adapted to his genius—to throw away, in one word, all the goods and gifts of fortune—that he might defend and sustain the cause which seemed to him the just one. ‘The victorious cause pleased the gods’, and now perhaps, as victorious causes will do, it pleases the majority of men, and yet no one can withhold his admiration from the man who, though numbered among the vanquished, held his faith pure and unblemished even at the price of poverty and exile”.
Thus did England make amends for its former failure to honor Maury before the Civil War when medals and decorations were bestowed upon him by so many other European governments. While in Cambridge, Maury gave a lecture on “Science and the Bible; Educational Ideals of the South” to further the interest in England in the financial support of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. In this address he contended for religious education in the college, and maintained that the Bible and science do not conflict if each is rightly interpreted.